A characteristic unique to humans is the amount of time we spend thinking about what isn't happening: the past, the future, or hypothetical situations. This type of thinking, known as mental wanderingMindfulness is considered a key capacity for learning, reasoning, and planning, but various philosophical and religious traditions suggest it can have an emotional cost. Based on this hypothesis, a team from Harvard University analyzed the relationship between mind wandering and emotional well-being in everyday life. Using a mobile app, the researchers, led by MA Killingsworth, collected real-time data from more than two thousand adults, who reported what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they felt at that moment. The results showed that the mind wanders almost half the time, with little variation depending on the activity, and that happiness levels are lower when thoughts are not focused on the present activity. In other words, when it comes to explaining emotional well-being, what we think about is more decisive than what we are doing, and that a wandering mind, despite its cognitive value, carries a measurable emotional cost.

This novel is another stone – and there are many already, thanks to the efforts of the Raig Verd publishing house – to build the universe Ursula K. Le Guin in Catalan and to understand the scope of the work, so varied, of one of the most important authors of Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Lavinia It doesn't belong to any of the famous cycles; it goes its own way, like its protagonist. It's more of a historical novel than a fantasy, and at the same time, it's an exercise in rewriting history. The Aeneid of Virgil. If in the twelve-book epic the character of Aeneas's wife has not a single line of dialogue and is always in the shadow of the Trojan warrior, Le Guin wanted to put her at the center and gave her the voice she lacked in the classical world. Part of the book's merit lies in this gesture. Originally published in 2009, it belongs to the wave of works that challenge the flatness of patriarchal tradition and, in a creative way that doesn't negate but enriches it, assert that history cannot have been written or starred in solely by men. In the epilogue she wrote at the end of the novel, the author declares her unconditional love for Virgil and says that what she intended was only "a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character in his story, the unfolding of a clue."